Now that my hubby and I are in a house, we decided it was time to buy a christmas tree.  He’s allergic to real trees, so artificial is the way to go for us.  But we want one of the new trees that are made with the molded plastic needles, so at least it’ll look real.  We’ve been looking everywhere, but the trees we like are either 9 feet tall (and we have 8 foot ceilings) or cost almost as much as our mortgage.  We decided to take one last stab at the hunt last night and went to Sears last night. 

I was meeting my hubby there after work and got there first.  I found the trees and, much to my amazement, found one that I knew we both would like.  Unfortunately, the tree didn’t have a sign or price tag.  The saleswoman found a sign that had a picture and description of each tree for sale.  By the time my hubby arrived, we had narrowed it down to two possible trees, one of which was out of our price range and both showed out of stock.  The saleswoman was nice enough to go to the stockroom and see if she could find one of the trees that might not be showing in stock.  After waiting around for a while, she came back and told us that she had managed to find a box with the more expensive tree.  After all that trouble, and all of our running around, we figured we would take the chance. 

We paid for the tree (and I bought an item for myself, which I discovered later was to be a Xmas present from my hubby) and then drove over to the merchandise pick-up area.  The guy comes out and tells us that the tree isn’t in stock.  We assured him that the saleswoman herself went to the stockroom and found the tree.  After another lengthy wait, we were told that the tree simply couldn’t be found anywhere. 

Back to the saleswoman we went, so we could get our money back.  She insisted the tree existed and she went back to confirm this.  Unfortunately, the item number on the box had been read incorrectly, and sure enough, the tree was not in stock.  The woman returned the item, at which time we discovered that Sears counts a debit card purchase as a cash transaction, which meant that we got our money back in cash. 

So… our entire evening out amounted to a two hour unintended trip to the ATM.